I may have just missed the facts but I don't remember seeing any official mention about these things.

If these have been confirmed, I'm sorry for spam, otherwise let's speculate:

For example you start as an archer and from there you have a possibility to advance to either ranger or hunter. By advancing to either, the other one is locked out. These classes once again branch off to different options, let's say from hunter you can access either scout or fletcher and from ranger to hackapell or quarrel shooter etc.

Also, could it be possible that some of the classes are actually achievable to any of the starting classes (cleric, swordsman, wizard, archer) ? Alchemist for example hasn't been announced to belong under any of the primary classes. It would be reasonable to assume that most of the hidden classes to be this way.

The branching class trees would make balancing a lot easier, I seriously doubt they'll allow one primary class to go around the whole pool of sub-classes. Especially pvp-wise the balancing would turn out to be a nightmare.

Yeah, these details haven't been clarified yet. Though before anything else, I'm pretty sure that classes 'branch out' like in most games. If hoplite and barbarian are unlocked at rank 3, then they're unlocked regardless of my choice in rank 2 (peltasta/highlander/swordsman 2). Maybe class prerequisites aren't abandoned entirely, but it's going to be reserved for special cases if ever. This wasn't explicitly stated, but it's hinted by the 'freedom of build' that they're marketing, plus the inconsistency/awkwardness of certain class prerequisites if they did exist (e.g. it'd be more logical if barbarian came from highlander rather than peltasta).

Anyway, the rest of my speculations are also different. I don't think getting pyro locks out cryo and similar things. Again from the image of a peltasta in the first Q&A #1, one could argue that highlander is darker than the rest of the rank 3 options, but I think the bigger question is why it even appears there at all.

I also no longer think that there will be ffa classes. We're past the halfway mark and classes that seemed to be ffa turned out to belong to some basic class after all. Alchemists would logically stem from wizard, and that's not considering that they were seen fighting with staves. I'm fairly certain that Shinobi comes from swordsman, as I've expressed in another post. Appraiser is probably wizard, shepherd is probably cleric, squire is likely swordsman, elementalist is likely wizard. Anyway, if a class is ffa, chances are it's gonna have less affinity toward weapons/combat, but this was already addressed before.

Balance-wise, we gotta admit that the game isn't initially designed around pvp. Sure, pvp may be the strongest point later on, but by then the players would know what clusterfuck of class combinations they're entering. Beyond that, we'll just have to wait and see. What I do know is that not many games are willing to take a risk like this. Which is funny because job systems in real life aren't exactly linear.

About the ffa classes, I on the other hand think that because we've 'only' seen roughly half and the pool's already quite diverse, there could be anything waiting in the second half. To go further with my speculations they're still missing a musical class, which however would most likely fall under archer. But maybe a hidden jack-of-all-trades class like super novice?

my guess is that this won't exist. in ro, the novice was the base class, which then advanced to swordsman or archer. in tos, the base class is already an archer or swordsman. i don't see how they could incorporate a jack-of-all-trades class if you're forced to immediately choose one of the four branches from the start.

my guess is that this won't exist. in ro, the novice was the base class, which then advanced to swordsman or archer. in tos, the base class is already an archer or swordsman. i don't see how they could incorporate a jack-of-all-trades class if you're forced to immediately choose one of the four branches from the start.

True, true. It could be an unlockable hidden starting class though. probably not though